Motivation, Heroin and Good Intentions

It shocks me that law officials would even consider this a viable solution to drug addiction. If you add up the hundreds of dollars a day that drug addicts spend on their habit, and then consider that that has never been incentive enough to quit, I don’t see how anyone could justify this solution. But I guess it’s just another desperate attempt at a desperate problem.

“My heart sank when I read the headline on the front page of The Independent this morning. The latest initiative to reduce heroin addiction is to offer a financial reward to those addicts that give it up. How much precisely? £10! That’s right. In fact it’s not even cash that’s being offered; it’s a £10 shopping voucher (for food presumably rather than X Box games).

And support for this new policy appears to be widespread and optimistic. Well I hate to be the spoilsport but my prediction is that this policy will get absolutely nowhere and be an unmitigated disaster. The only upside being that it won’t be an expensive one because no-one will actually have to pay out any money.

So precisely then here’s the idea: you pay heroin addicts a £10 shopping voucher on a weekly basis if they provide a clean urine sample i.e. they have not taken any heroin recently. So let’s be clear about this. What they are saying is that people chronically dependent on heroin both physiologically and psychologically, many with low self-esteem, chaotic personal lives and a bleak future ahead of them will be so tempted by the £10 inticement that they will instantly put down their infected needles and instantly become fully functioning members of society once again. Land Cuckoo and Cloud.

Because if money was really a factor here, you’d have thought the hundreds of pounds a week that they might save by not buying heroin and the money they would make by being able to hold down a job might have incentivised them previously. If these people are of such clarity of mind to summon up all of their will power for £10 worth of fish fingers and garlic bread every week, you’d think they might just have been able to muster up the drive previously to quit so as to avoid becoming infected with AIDS or Hepatiitis and escape death from an overdose or another stint in prison, but guess what? Heroin kind of stops you thinking and acting rationally like that.” Click the link below to read the entire article….